1. Field of the Invention
This invention is related to a computer implemented method for real-time automatic analysis of a customer's/bill submitter's bill, such as a cell phone bill, for errors and utilization of services or products from a billing company using computer loaded public and current market information for selected billing companies and providing a report back in real-time to the customer/bill submitter and/or billing company by a third-party computer server providing the corrective action necessary. The third-party computer server may add the corrective action or errors by type of errors for each billing company to a blind summary in the memory of the server computer by type of errors for each billing company from previous analysis for each billing company's collective errors to use the individual collective summary of errors for each billing company to enhance and improve future bill analysis on the server computer and to provide a summary to each billing company of its collective errors over a preselected time.
This invention is achieved by loading public and current market plan information on a third-party server computer and creating individual data fields and patterns from the data of the loaded public and current market information for each company, such as a cell phone company for selected multiple companies on the server computer, and then obtaining a bill in electronic format from the billing company, such as a cell phone company, generated in electronic format by the company sending the bill, for analysis of errors and utilization of the bill on the third-party's computer server against the individual data fields and patterns created from the published public and current market information.
After the bill is submitted, the computer server first determines if the bill submitted is in text readable format and is from a company for which public and current market plan information is stored on the computer. If it is not, the computer advises the bill submitter over the internet of an error and that it cannot proceed forward with the bill analysis. If the bill is in text readable format and is from a company determined to be a company for which public and current market plan information is stored on the computer, then the bill text data is read into the computer as text content and matched against individual data fields and patterns from the public and current market information loaded in the server computer's memories for comparison against the public and current market plan information on the server computer and runs calculations to analyze the bill for errors and utilization of the bill received from the bill submitter relative to the billing company's public and current market plan information to determine if a billing error has occurred. A report is generated on the server computer for the bill submitted and is readied for displayed through the server computer over the Internet to the bill submitter to show any errors in the bill, but first the bill submitter is advised electronically by displaying in real-time an indication that a report is ready and then the server computer allows the bill submitter to enter payment information to pay for the report before being allowed to view the report of analyzed bill for errors and utilization over the Internet.
After reviewing the report of the analyzed bill for errors and utilization, the bill submitter, at bill submitter's election, may elect to forward the analyzed bill showing the results to the billing company, such as a cell phone company, for corrective action on the bill submitter's account or the bill submitter may elect to have third-party's web server computer forward such report to the billing company.
After the report is generated the billing errors are added by category and type of error and utilization for the billing company as a blind summary in memory of generated reports by type of errors for each billing company stored on the computer from previous analysis for each billing company's collective errors for a predetermined time. This collective summary of errors by category and type of errors and utilization stored on the computers may then be used in at least two ways. One way the collective summary of errors for each billing company stored on the server computer is used, is for showing each particular billing company its collective errors and utilization by category for each particular billing company over a predetermined time. Another way the collective summary of errors for each billing company stored on the computer is used, is for adding each particular billing company's collective errors and utilization to the public and current market plan information on the server to update and enhance the accuracy of the public and current market information on said stored information for each billing company to improve analysis and accuracy of future bills submitted by bill submitter's for errors and utilization.
2. Description of Related Art
The present invention may be useful in situations where companies, such as cell phone companies, issue bills to their customers in large volumes based on public rate plans or services. The prior art required a customer/bill submitter to have significant knowledge about how the industry and/or billing company computed their bills using rate plans on which the customer's bill was based. This required the customer/bill submitter to have knowledge and data required to make an analysis of their bills against the public rate plan of the billing company and required a significant amount of time for data collection by the customer/bill submitter before an analysis of the bill could even be undertaken.
The prior art, in some cases, required the customer/bill submitter to provide paper invoices, credit memorandum, and their current plan information before analysis could be commenced. Sometimes the prior art required that, that data to be converted to electronic form by optical character reader to put their data into an electronic form prior to being submitted for analysis and before analysis could be commenced.
Sometimes the prior art required a bill submitter to communicate back and forth with the party doing the analysis to verify all the data was properly received and was complete, before an analysis could be commenced.
In the case of the prior art using third-party companies to do the evaluation and analysis of bills, these third-party companies proceeded to build a baseline template for analysis of the customer's account in historical time and the comparisons were made against various billing companies plans or against the customer's plan but were time delayed because of the complicated analysis and reporting requirements from the customer/bill submitter.
Further, the prior art was not able to utilize just the bill provided by the bill submitter from the billing company to run its analysis for errors and utilization for the analysis for the bill submitter, but required additional input from the customer/bill submitter. Clearly the prior art did not provide for receiving a bill in electronic format generated by the billing company over the Internet from the customer/bill submitter, or retrieving the bill submitter's bill in electronic format generated by the billing company over the Internet by a third-party company from billing company, on which to perform the analysis for billing errors and utilization and that nothing else was required to commence and perform an analysis for billing errors and utilization.
Also the prior art did not provide for a simple interfacing by the customer/bill submitter simply logging on to a third-party's website server computer and submitting either the bill from the billing company in electronic format or providing data to the third-party website server computer which would allow the server computer to obtain the bill for the bill submitter from the billing company in electronic format by accessing billing companies computers.
Yet another problem with prior art was that each customer/bill submitter's bill submission was treated as a one-of-a-kind procedure and there was no collection and correlation of data and information against published public and current market rate plan information even if that data was actually maintained on the server computer for analysis of errors and utilization.
The prior art also failed to use the published public and current market rate plan information by breaking it down into individual data fields and patterns of data on the server computer so each piece could be used in rapid computer analysis for errors and utilization of service by each individual billing company from multiple companies preselected from a group of companies against a bill submitted.
Further the prior art did not teach analyzing a bill received in electronic format via server computer to determine that the electronic format is in text readable form and then reading the contents of said text, for example cell phone bill, to the memory of the server computer to determine which billing company, such as a cell phone company, the bill was from and whether it was a company on which public and current market information had been loaded to the server computer and whether the electronic bill was in a text form which was readable by the server computer. The prior art represented that it could process and analyze errors and utilization for all companies, because it relied upon the bill submitter to provide the company name and data necessary for bill analysis for errors and utilization and therefore it did not need a means of identifying from which company the bill submitter was submitting his/its bill.
The prior art issued transaction identifiers to identify the bill submitter's bill while it was being processed, but the transaction identifier did not serve as a intelligent transaction identifier to identify the dates for which the bill was provided, account number of bill submitter, and/or the billing company for allowing tracking of the bill submitted by all or any combination of the data listed above and therefore did not allow transaction identifier to serve as a intelligent transaction identifier.
Also the prior art did not compare and read into memory the stored text of the bill submitted, under unique intelligent transaction identifier, by comparing the text read into the computer against specific phrase patterns to determine if the stored text match associated data fields and patterns created from the public and current market plan information created for each company from the multiple billing companies loaded in memory.
Further, since the prior art relied on the bill submitter and the billing company's invoice as the primary sources for obtaining data on which to calculate for errors and utilization, and did not automatically run the extracted values and terms, in the case of cell phone companies, through a phone number call lookup database to determine the data concerning each phone number and call as to whether it was a cell phone call, a pay phone call, a landline call and then determine for example only whether the calls were all from the same carrier, different carriers, etc. the cell phone company prior art calculated errors and utilization were highly inaccurate in its error analysis and utilization evaluations.
Also the prior art after computing the errors and utilization of the billing company did not collect summaries from its reports by category and type of error by billing company for all billing companies whose public and current market information were used in the process of analyzing all bills submitted to the server computer and stored there for some predetermined time so that they could generate from said server computer errors and utilization reports for each billing company by billing company for its collective errors and utilization for each of the billing companies for which public and current market information was loaded on the server computers.
Further, since the prior art did not collect a cumulative report of errors and utilization by each individual billing company for all bills analyzed by the server computer, the prior art did not have the cumulative report of errors and utilization to add to the public and current market information analyzed to update and enhance the accuracy of analysis for errors and utilization for future bill analysis. The prior art, thus, did not provide a self teaching computer system for bill analysis and the cumulative report of errors and utilization analysis which improved the computers accuracy in future analysis.